She shook her head. “But once they got across…”
“The Mason-Dixon Line? Once they made it north they were in free territory, and all they had to do was turn around and thumb nose at Massa? Nope. Didn’t work that way for anybody except thieves and murderers like Bonnie and Clyde. They passed the Hot Pursuit Laws to stop them, but there was a hot pursuit law for niggers all along, since 1793. First Fugitive Slave Act…” Something clicked in my mind. I went back to the table and picked up the cards, flipping through the red, then the orange. “Yeah,” I said. “There’s your connection. The First Fugitive Slave Act was passed in Congress in 1793. It provided for the seizure of a fugitive slave in free territory. There was a lot of trouble about it, but the first challenge came in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, in 1842. Seems that the planters had gotten a little fast and loose with the Fugitive Slave Act, and they would come across the border and claim a free black and find a tame magistrate and get a certificate of remand and haul the poor bugger back South. There was a murder case involved. A freeman named John Read killed two white men who came into his house to take him. They found handcuffs, rope, and whips at the scene. There was a mess about it, and Read was acquitted of killing Griffith, who was supposed to be his master, but found guilty of manslaughtering Shipley, who had come along to help Griffith. The state had pushed for the death penalty, but the jury of Read’s peers only gave him nine years. The legislature passed the Personal Liberty Laws, which made it harder for a free black to be taken, since he had to be given due process under the laws, where he didn’t under the Fugitive Slave Act. Then along came Prigg, a Maryland man, who sued in federal court, and the Supreme Court held that the Pennsylvania laws were unconstitutional because they were in conflict with a federal statute, which they wouldn’t have been able to do without John Marshall’s opinion of federal legal supremacy in McCulloch v. Maryland. There’s your connection.”
“And they didn’t have to prove that the black was a runaway?”
“Only to a magistrate. And…” I flipped through the cards again. “Here we go. In 1816 the justice of the peace in Town owned two slaves, one a woman named Milla, the other a child named Bonaparte. Sorry. Bonaparte was legally an indentured servant; Milla too, probably. But imagine exactly how fair a hearing a scraggly runaway was going to get. And that’s if he got this far. Down in the South County, in Southampton Township, a man named Jacob Adams was justice of the peace. I don’t know what his politics were, but he hailed from Loudon County, Virginia. He was the justice of the peace”—I flipped through the cards again, more slowly this time; my eyes weren’t as quick as they had been—“for thirty-five years. Then his son took over.”
“And they were crooked?”
I looked at her. “What do you mean, crooked?”
“Well…”
“There’s no evidence that anybody did anything illegal. There is every reason to suspect that they scrupulously upheld the law. Which said that a runaway black was exactly the same as a runaway horse, and that interfering with an owner or his agent attempting to regain his property was exactly like interfering with a man trying to catch his horse; the same as being a horse thief.”
“They were people—”
“No,” I said. “No, they were not people. That was the one thing everybody agreed on, including Abolitionists. Legally, a slave was not a person. And good old Judge Marshall comes in here again; he made the Constitution supreme, and the Constitution recognized slavery. It regulated it, and it gave Congress the power to tax imports at the rate of ten bucks a head. In fact, towards 1860, certain people started advancing the proposition that there was nothing illegal about enslaving white people—”
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“What don’t you understand?”
“It sounds like you’re defending it.”
“Defending what?”
“Slavery.”
“It was a fact. I’m a historian.”
“What about your family?” she said. “Were they runaways?”
“No. God, no. The Professor would have died. No indeed, that’s the boring story. The crazy niggers who came here out of choice. The Stantons were good Tidewater house slaves. Got freed about 1800; I don’t know the exact date; the Professor had the papers, but he gave them to a library. But it had to have been before 1806, because that’s when the Virginia legislature made every freedman get permission to stay in the state, and I remember the Professor had a certificate dated 1806. That’s in the library too. The family stayed in Dinwiddie, Virginia. There was some kind of connection with somebody, because they were all educated after the Civil War; the Professor wasn’t the first one to go to college. A couple of doctors, a lawyer or two, and three or four preachers. The Professor got his Ph.D. and taught in Washington. Didn’t come here until 1942.”
“What about the Washingtons?”
“What about them?”
“When did they come here?”
“That’s a long story,” I said.
“Which you aren’t going to tell me.”
“It’s not interesting,” I said.
“I’m interested.”
“I’m not.”
She didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes and leaned back and let the toddy warm me. Tried to. I heard her get up and move towards the door. Her steps were short, quick; angry. She stopped suddenly, spoke abruptly.
“That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you’re trying to figure out. What your father was doing here.”
“Lord, no,” I said. “I know all that. That’s why it isn’t interesting. I’m trying to figure out why he died.”
“What do you mean? I thought his death was an accident.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too. But it wasn’t. They covered up to make it look like an accident. They thought it was murder made to look like suicide but they knew nobody would believe that, so they made it out to be an accident. But it wasn’t murder.” I shook my head and got up and went to the stove.
“You’ve just discovered your father committed suicide,” she said.
“Not just,” I said.
“How long have you known?”
“Since Wednesday,” I said. “Since I wrote you the letter. I wasn’t sure then; I waited until I was sure before I mailed it.”
“And you’re trying to find out why he killed himself.”
The kettle boiled. I poured the water in and stirred the toddy with my finger, burning myself. I carried the mug back to the table and sat down heavily, spilling a little of the toddy on the note pad. She was watching me, so I had to struggle to hold the mug steady while I sipped at it. I tasted the toddy and realized I had forgotten the sugar. It didn’t matter. She watched me drink. I set the cup down carefully and took up the cards, starting to merge them all into one stack. It looked like a rainbow. I was confused; the lamplight flickered, not steady now, and I could hardly read the dates. She watched me for a while—fumbling with the cards and sipping at the toddy, spilling it—then she got up and came around the table and took the mug out of my hands. She put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me up, turned me. I could barely see her; the lamplight was betraying me. All I could see was the blue of her eyes. Her fingers moved over me, unbuttoning my shirt, undoing my belt. She undressed me quickly, efficiently, as if she were undressing a child. I did not resist her. She led me to the cot and pushed me down on it, then went back to the table and blew out the lamp.
In the darkness I heard her undressing, the clink of buckles, the rasp of a zipper. In a few minutes I could see her a little, the pale outline of her body glowing in the ruddy light that escaped from the chinks in the stove. In a moment she came and slid onto the cot beside me and I felt her against me, her skin hot where it had been closest to the stove. She pulled me to her, her arms strong and her fingers spread against my back. She did not move after that, just lay there holding me immobile, her muscles tensed, her body hard, unyielding. I knew she was waiting for me to do something, but she held
my arms prisoner; I could not touch her. I tried to; I struggled, but she tightened her grip and held me still. “Shh,” she said, in a tight harsh whisper. “Shhh…” I stopped moving then, stopped doing anything, breathed as shallowly as I could, waiting and waiting, until the keening of the logs in the grate became a lullaby and I thought that I would fall asleep, fall away from her. And then, just when perhaps I would have, she gave one deep sigh and her breathing quickened, and I felt her thighs move, slipping around me below and above, and I felt her belly against me, and then the softness and heat and moistness that lurked below.
I stood on the ridge, exposed to the full force of the wind that came driving out of the south. The snow had stopped but the wind kicked that which had already fallen into great white clouds, full of icy spicules that stung my face. On the slope below me the drifts were building; they would be even worse on the eastern slopes; because of the mountains’ northeastern swing, the drifts would build there too, but the wind would not be slowed by the contour of the land. And what it meant was that if I was going to go, I would have to go now, before the eastern slopes were fully drifted, before the inevitable swing of the wind into the west drifted the western slopes and choked the valleys too.
I did not want to go. I did not want to go at all. I would rather have sat in the cabin, sipping toddies, listening to Judith’s snoring, even looking at those damned cards. But there was nothing in the cards for me; I knew that now. And I had gone to every other place on the map, visited the caves and the hollows and the hideouts, all of it. There was only one place left. Only once chance left for me to understand. If there was a chance at all.
I shifted the pack to make it ride more easily, and fumbled in the pocket of Bill’s field jacket for the flask. I took a sip, keeping it small; the whiskey in the flask and in the bottle in the pack was going to have to last… I figured quickly. A forty-five-mile round trip, at maybe three miles an hour, allow for rest and delay due to the snowfall… Call it twenty hours, perhaps twenty-two. I realized that I should have brought another bottle. But I would not go back; I might wake Judith. And I was wasting time thinking about it; I shifted the pack again and started down.
I stopped when I got as far as Moses Washington’s house. I don’t know why I stopped. But while I stood there I wondered, for the first time, if she knew the truth about what he had done. Probably not. Probably it was the kind of thing that she would work at not knowing, or at least, at not believing. Just as I had. But then I realized that it made no difference what she knew, because for a dozen years she had lived with a man who was so crazy that one day he was going to walk twenty-two miles just to find a nice spot in which to blow his brains out, and so preoccupied as not only to do it, but not to care enough about the effect of it on his wife—and his children—to try and make it look like an accident; a man who showed her no mercy. And then I thought of Judith, waking in the morning to find me gone.
And so I climbed up onto Moses Washington’s porch and opened the door of Moses Washington’s house, and stepped inside, shivering a little, trying to be silent.
But the house was not silent. The darkness echoed with electronic static scratchings and the raspy sound of an announcer’s voice; she was listening to the radio, some all-night call-in show from Boston or Detroit. The sound of it grew louder as climbed the stairs, made my way through dark familiar rooms: “My grandfather got off a boat from the old country, Dan, and he was discriminated, but he worked hard and he made his way, and I think anybody can do the same thing.” I went and stood at the doorway of her bedroom, looking at the mound her body made beneath the handmade quilts. “…hard work is the American way, even if you are discriminated…”
“John?” she said.
“…don’t like it, just go back where they came from. My grandfather had to fight to get here, and they didn’t have to do a thing…”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know if that’s quite the way to look at it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, Dan, that’s the way I look at it. I think if they took the welfare money and bought boats…”
“How can you listen to that garbage?” I said.
She reached out and turned the radio off. “I don’t really listen to it,” she said. “It just keeps me company.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you want to know?” she said again.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want to know anything.”
“You always want to know something,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. The radio scratched in the darkness. She reached out again and turned it off.
“Why did you marry him, anyway?” I said.
“I wanted to have children,” she said. Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact, as if she had expected the question.
“There were lots of men.”
“No,” she said. “There weren’t any. Not here.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We were allies,” she said. “We didn’t want the same things, but what we each wanted was close enough…. I wanted children, he wanted sons. He wanted two sons. He said that at the very beginning. I said I hoped he knew you couldn’t always control that kind of thing. He said he could. He had read and studied a lot of books and the Laws of the Old Testament, and he said that if we lived the way the children of Israel lived, then we would have sons. So we did. Part of the month he would sleep in the other room. And we had sons. And after your brother was born, that was the end of…that part of things. Because he had what he wanted, and I had what I wanted….”
“Didn’t you ever want anything else?”
“You mean love?” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Yes,” she said. “I wanted it. I suppose you could say I didn’t get it. Moses didn’t love the way most people would think a man should love…. I don’t know. I had what he gave me. Maybe it was love, maybe it wasn’t.”
“Was it worth it?” I said.
She didn’t say anything. But suddenly I could hear her breathing, there in the darkness.
“Was it?” I said. “Was it worth it?”
I heard her move then, heard the bedsprings creak as she reached out and turned the radio back on. I heard it hum as the tubes warmed.
I turned away from her then, and went into the powder room, wondering if what I was doing was the right thing, or even a kind thing; if Moses Washington’s way had not been better; if she had not, when they came to tell her that her life with him was a finished incident, breathed, somewhere inside her, a tiny sigh of relief. I stood there in the smell of hair pomade and stale perfume and wondered. But then the radio began to crackle again, and some insane insomniac began to chatter about the salvation of God, and I took the keys down and slipped them into my pocket and quietly went away.
197903120400 (Monday)
WE CAME SLAMMING DOWN OFF THE HILL, the tires half rolling, half sliding over the snow, giving me a minimum of control. I wasn’t steering, I was aiming, but that didn’t worry me—I had learned to take a car off the Hill long before my mother had found the money to buy snow tires—but Judith, sitting rigid in the right-hand seat and watching Railroad Street come flying up towards us, was frightened. “Shouldn’t you slow down?” she said.
I didn’t answer her; I was running out of Hill. I had time to flick the headlights and hit the horn, just in case there was somebody on Railroad Street, and then we went diving down into the hollow at the base of the Hill, the speedometer reading thirty-five. The rise beyond the dip killed some of the speed, but the wall of the warehouse on the other side of the road came roaring up at twenty-five, and I heard Judith say something, but I was too busy to listen, too busy hitting the clutch and holding it down and jamming the transmission into second, and then stabbing at the brakes once, hard, and cranking the wheel around to the left. The rear end kicked out, and I flicked the wheel just a little. The rear end came around then, and straight
ened out, perfectly square, and I had traction and control, and drove on, steadily, sedately.
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